What we learnt at our Breakfast Club for Fundraising Leaders

What did we learn at our Breakfast Club for Fundraising Leaders this week? In case you weren’t able to join us (and the hundreds of fundraising leaders who attended), here is a short summary of some key insights from the sessions.?

Rob kicked off the session by covering some powerful tactics for How to Grow Corporate and Major Gifts Income in 2024, sharing various examples from Bright Spot’s popular Major Gifts Mastery and Corporate Partnerships Mastery Programmes.

Where to focus your attention

Compared to what common sense usually tells us, the potential for results with high value supporters is massively skewed! Just a few of your donors / potential partners are much, much more able and likely to give very large donations / very valuable partnerships, compared to the rest. In any fundraising market, design your strategy accordingly!

A powerful strategy in business is to focus on the top 20% of customers and find ways to add value to them. Rob has found this principle is very effective in fundraising. To increase the chances that you feel motivated to follow through on this concept, Rob recommends reading The 80/20 Rule by Richard Koch, or listening to Fundraising Bright Spots Episode 135 (The Top 20% Rule for growing Individual Giving results).

Build your Dream Ten list

It’s important to be specific when identifying potential corporate partners. Pick 10 or 12 companies that you think would be a great fit for your organisation. Show those 10 logos to people who care about your charity - your trustees, your senior leadership team, your event colleagues etc etc… and ask whether they know anyone at the company and could potentially introduce you. This obviously doesn’t get you a partnership, but it does help you get your foot in the door for a chat, which is a crucial step many charities really struggle with.?

Do what car companies do

We’ve noticed that the most effective, likeable car-salespeople tend not to get too attached to whether a potential customer actually buys the car or not. At some level, they know it’s beyond their control. Instead, they tend to focus a great deal of attention on setting up chances for people to just do a test drive. And so it is with high value fundraising. One big reason why fundraisers who do the Major Gifts Mastery and Corporate Mastery Programmes tend to build great momentum and increase fundraising income, is that we help them get really good at increasing the number of informal chats, coffees, (free) event attendance (ie these are all our equivalent of test drives), than they were managing before they start the programme.?

Doing well at getting more chats with supporters makes an immense difference to your fundraising progress, and almost everyone who takes part in these programmes at least DOUBLES their results in this important area.

Make the most of LinkedIn

Mark, who took part in our last Corporate Programme managed to set up a very valuable first coffee with the key player at one of his Dream 10 partners, using LinkedIn. We’ve found that LinkedIn is often an under-estimated and misunderstood tool for building relationships with existing and potential partners / supporters.?

What usually happens is that fundraisers connect largely with other fundraisers (because that’s what LinkedIn encourages you to do. It’s easier to advertise to a group with something in common.)?

Instead, get clear on what kind of funders / trusts / companies you would like to get to know, and link in with them as much as possible. Importantly, when you do this, and interact / comment / share, you will start to be noticed by all the other funders in that space who they know. (Importantly, note that it’s usually way more people than you’d think, because many of them know each other).

To dive deeper into this topic, listen to Fundraising Bright Spots episode 150 with Michelle Benson.

Add value to existing relationships

One of the best sources of growth for fundraisers on our programmes comes from developing existing relationships. One example comes from a brilliant, generous fundraiser named Jemma, who is taking part in our current Corporate Mastery Programme.? She was looking for ways to thank a handful of generous corporate supporters. She thought about how she could make them feel appreciated. She and her colleague made time to hand-deliver boxes of Valentine's brownies and cupcakes (from their hospice caterers). As you can imagine, all the supporters they spoke to were touched and felt really appreciated.?

Focus on give, not get!

You can turn a supporter’s bad day into a good one by just picking up the phone and saying thank you to a supporter. One example of this is to hold a Thankathon day! Get ideas and inspiration to sell this idea to your colleagues from the fabulous example of Alice Barley Chaudhuri at Chance for Childhood. In this podcast chat she talks about how they implemented a truly impactful Thankathon, which had amazing knock on effects for fundraising, (halting the decline in regular giving to the charity) in Fundraising Bright Spots Episode 103.

Our keynote session today was on building a high support / high challenge culture in your organisation by Alan Bolchover, Director of Fundraising, Marketing and Communications at Outward Bound Trust.

There are thousands of fundraisers out there who are trying to win as much business and get as many donors as possible - it’s a very competitive market. In order to cut through this noise, it’s valuable to get clear about who we are. Each charity is different, with different strengths and potential assets. So when we think about culture, Alan often asks the question ‘Who are you?’ as a fundraising team. What? can we offer that others can’t?

Echoing Rob’s point about focusing on The 80/20 Principle, Alan shared an example of a charity concert and auction. He had noticed that the vast majority of the income they made that evening, came from about 20 people out of the total 800 in the room! Resources are always limited, so he realised the power in focusing disproportionate energy on building relationships with those top 20 givers.

If you want to build a team culture based on high support / high challenge, the type of attributes to want to deliberately cultivate are:

• A strong level of commitment
• Constructive feedback - after every win, loss, campaign, event… give everyone the opportunity to feed back
• Positive and negative evaluation
• Assertive, equal relationships with donors (many fundraisers talk to donors in a very deferential way)
• Conflict is handled
• Open, honest and respectful
• Culture of accountability
• Honouring of commitments
• Trust is everything

For Alan and his team the cornerstone that has helped them achieve extraordinary growth over the last five years has been an enduring sense of ambition. Aiming high has helped them make serious progress, and build confidence through each step forward.

For example, the Outward Bound Trust raised ￡2.8Million through an abseil down the shard - something they didn’t think they’d ever be able to achieve a few years before. They set the bar high with their request for participants - they asked 40 people to raise ￡100,000 each. By setting the bar that high, people bought into that ambition (it’s reassuringly expensive). They are also ambitious about the people they invite to events, and they’re not afraid to ask!

We’ve all heard this idea, but it can be hard to do in practice…but they’ve found it pays to chase those dreams!

They also focus on dry and wet fundraising - the dry fundraising is the cause and what you do, and some people just aren’t initially very interested in that. But they are interested in having fun. If you can bring some fun to the table for High Net Worth Individuals, (a great event) you then have an opportunity to potentially inspire them about the cause.

One big problem we face as fundraisers is that a large pool of donors are in the ‘don’t know’ category of support. We just don’t know if they are on board or not. So try and move as many donors as possible to a more definite category. To get better at this, we need to make honest, sometimes challenging conversations about these relationships, normal. And accepting / expecting some failure as inevitable.

It’s more important to link your self-respect as a fundraiser to our level of effort, not just to our results on any given day. We can usually tell when we put a lot of effort in, and when that happens we need to feel justly proud and celebrate, irrespective of ‘the score on the board’. As has happened for Outward Bound Trust, the more you value effort in this way, the more the results usually flow too.?

Most importantly, fundraising needs to be fun. When work stops being fun, it’s important to take a ‘heads out’ mentality - go out and find new inspiration.?

A huge thank you to everyone who attended the Breakfast Club and to our fantastic speakers. We hope you found it helpful and if you want to be the first to hear about more events like this, sign up to our email newsletter here: https://bit.ly/30xxADU?

If you’re a Corporate Partnerships or Major Donor fundraiser, and you need to grow income this year, our long-standing training programmes will help. Find out more here: Corporate Partnerships Mastery and Major Gifts Mastery Programme.